Card Overview

What are cards?

Cards are standard payment instruments that enable your customers to access funds from their account. They can use these cards for various transactions such as cash withdrawals, POS purchase at storefronts, online bill payments and a lot more. Fusion enables you to handle card lifecycle - from issuance to management for your end customers.

This section covers more about payment cards and how Fusion can power seamless card transactions between your customers and their holding account.

Type of cards

Cards are divided into two categories based on its physical/virtual presence (by form) and the mode of transaction (by payment method).

Classification by form

Based on the form of card being issued to the user, fusion supports the following type of cards for your account holders.

Physical card

Customers can request for a standard physical card which can be used for both offline cash withdrawals and all online transactions. Printing physical cards usually undergoes a fulfilment process involving third-party vendors for embossing, designing and logistics.

Virtual card

Virtual cards are digital payment instruments ideally used for onus transactions, ecommerce payments, and other online transactions. Since, the virtual cards are offered to the account holders in the digital form, it takes very minimal time for activation. The card can be instantly activated upon issuance and offers the ability to customize/personalize the card right from the user’s app.

Hybrid card

A hybrid card is a combination of both physical and virtual cards that can be used for multipurpose. Account holders can request for the physical version of their virtual card based on their needs. Alternatively, as per the requirement of the program, you can initially choose to issue virtual cards to your account holder initially, and later issue/dispatch physical cards to them. While the physical card can be used for cash withdrawals from ATMs, account holders can also simultaneously use the virtual equivalent of the same card for online transactions.

Classification by payment method

For the physical cards, fusion extends support for various card features that are built to enable secure transactions and to improve user convenience while making payments. The following are the features supported by Fusion APIs to enforce a seamless payment standard.

Magstripe

Most of the traditional physical cards are equipped with magstripe (magnetic stripe) that is electronically embedded with account holder’s information such as their name, account number and so on. All these details are validated when the user swipes the card at a POS terminal to initiate cash debit from their account.

EMV

The EMV (Europay, Mastercard and Visa) standard; most commonly referred to as chip cards or smart cards, is a secure technology that embeds the account holder’s information into an integrated microchip within the card. The chip uses a dynamic encryption of account holder’s information during every step of the payment lifecycle. This serves as an additional layer of security when users insert the chip into POS terminals or an ATM, along with a custom PIN number to authorize the transaction.

Contactless

Contactless cards use RFID technology to enable secure and seamless payment experience. As the name indicates, users can initiate payments at any POS terminal (which has RFID support) just by tapping their card on it. This makes it easier to pay for purchases made via storefront since users don’t require a PIN to authorize the transaction.

Note: Contactless payment is currently under development and will be released soon.

Construct of bundles

Fusion offers the flexibility of creating bundles, which are essentially a collection of financial products packed together and offered to the account holder.

Consider a scenario, where a new user wants to avail a Visa general purpose debit card for their payment needs. The fintech provider offering the services can onboard this new user by providing them a bundle containing an account product and a payment product. Using Fusion bundle, fintechs can offer multiple account and payment products for an account holder at one go. In this section, we’ll learn further about a payment product and how it relates to payment cards.

Payment product

A payment product allows the account holders to spend the cash funds available on their account product. Popular payment products include debit/prepaid cards, UPIs and so on. A payment product consists of two entities: A form-factor and a resource product.

• A form-factor (or a payment instrument) product for an account holder can exist in different forms. These payment instruments such as prepaid cards enable users to access the funds present in their account. Fintechs can provide multiple form factors to their end customers depending on their needs.

• A resource product is a representation of the account holder on the payment side. The different form-factor products associated with an user’s account are directly linked to the respective resource product. In other words, a resource product is a collection of form-factor products used by the account holder. For a payment instrument to be created, it is necessary to have one resource product associated with the user account.

Card design and personalization

Based on your card type preference, Fusion can assist in custom designing of cards to reflect the corporate identity, specific occasion or target demographics. During the card management process, the customization requirements are promptly communicated to our embossing vendor. For even more complex or dynamic design changes, Fusion will help in facilitating a communication channel between you and the vendor.

To begin with your customization have a look at the following card terminologies closely:

Personalization

Using Fusion you can personalize different card offerings based on your preference or your company’s identity to attract more existing customers.

For instance:

• If you’re a corporate who wants to offer credit cards to your employees, you can simply opt for a non-personalized card that only has the company logo and doesn’t have any account holder information embossed.
• If you want to offer different credit cards targeting multiple selected customer groups, then you can choose to design a personalized card that allows you to customize various attributes like salutation, account holder name, profile image and the card colors.